Remember Desktop Publishing

Apple Lisa at Bletchley Park.

I worked for Rank Xerox, in the laser print and desktop publishing group, when the Apple Lisa hit the streets. This very smart, compact piece of equipment seemed to generate a new environment overnight.

The Lisa, the forerunner to the Mac, stole all the thunder Xerox was trying to create with the Star, 8100 and 6085 workstations. It’s staggering to think that equipment like this was running on 4MB of RAM.

The ability to easily change fonts, layouts, insert graphics and even add tables in the middle of a document is something we take for granted, even with free packages today.

The Apple Lisa list price in 1983 was $10,000. Which probably converted to £10,000. That would have bought you a whole lot of car, according to the New York Times of the day.

Remember, the Apple Lisa seriously undercut the costs of the Xerox systems!